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Online Tournament Strategy
By
Nicholas James McDowell
5-21-06
You’ve been playing online poker for a while now, and the play
money is easy to come by. Vast sums the size of last year’s salary exchange
hands with every river and you find yourself wondering with childish glee, what
if it was real? You figure, how much of a difference can it be to sit down with
real stakes?
So then you find yourself sitting at a real money game, pocket aces in hand.
There’s an inside straight draw on the board, and you have a grim feeling your
pair might not hold. But no one is going to get you to lay down bullets! You’ve
never mucked them before, why should you now? So you do what you did at the play
money tables: test the waters with an all-in bluff. You get called big time and
as you’re throwing your mouse across the room, you wonder: where can I get more
experience?
An easy and inexpensive way to glean experience from
poker online sites is the
real money, single-table tournaments. You can sit down to these 10-player games
for anywhere from $10-50 (the bigger the buy-in, the bigger the payout), and
they can give you the best hour of education anywhere.
The thing you’ll learn first about these real money games, is that the same
outlandish moves that people make at the fake money tables are made here. “Hey,
I’ll go all in, the very first hand, pre-flop and see what happens,” is a creed
that is very rarely rewarded. Sure, this guy might get lucky once or twice, and
his reward could be doubling or tripling up (though it’s most often merely
winning the blinds, if at all). Don’t be this guy, beware this guy, and let him
and his cohorts take each other out while you and other patient players sit
tight and stake your claim.
Winnings for these tourneys are generally based on a top three (sometimes even
four) tier system. Let’s say you bought-in for $15. This could mean that first
place is $30, second place is $20, and third is $15. Can you simply play tight
enough to make it to the top three? With the aforementioned dummies playing like
they play, your chances are a lot better, and if you come in third, at least
you’ve played real stakes for free, and learned something along the way.
For some players these single table tourneys are their bread and butter. They
run as soon as the table is full (every 2-5 minutes on average) and can be as
easy to win as just sitting back and not getting hit by the flying all-ins. But
actually playing well at these tables is altogether different. With real money
at stake, you’ll find the instinct to tighten up a real asset. Unless you have
an incredible hand (like those bullets you never muck) you’ll need to be
conservative. Even with a great pocket pair, your betting has to be vastly
different than on the fake money tables. Remember: going all in is like a
nuclear option: everyone knows you have it, and, unless you are the fly in their
trap, they don’t want you to use it. If you keep your all-ins to a minimum,
serious players will take you seriously, which advantages you for future bluffs
and paydays.
So pick up your mouse from the floor, shake off your ‘bad beat’ depression and
get back out there, there’s at least one table with your name on it.
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